Tag Archives: custom actions

Introducing Lux: Declarative unit testing for custom actions

The Cambridge-based WiX East Virtual Team have is pleased to announce its first major contribution to WiX: The Lux unit-testing framework. Lux will be available in the next weekly release of WiX v3.5.
Unit-testing custom actions with Lux
Custom actions are a frequent cause of installation failures so it’s important to test them thoroughly. Custom actions themselves [...]

Verbose logging from WcaUtil

WcaUtil is a static library of convenience functions for writing custom actions in native C++. One of the more useful functions is WcaLog, which writes messages into the Windows Installer log. The first argument to WcaLog is the level of the message:

LOGMSG_TRACEONLY: Written to the log only in debug builds for debugging custom actions.
LOGMSG_VERBOSE: Written [...]

Testing your deferred and rollback custom actions

When you include deferred custom actions — that somehow modify the machine — in your setup, you have two big responsibilities:

Provide rollback custom actions that "undo" what the deferred CAs do so that the installation transaction is actually transactional.
Test.
Test.
Test.

OK, so numbers 2 through 4 are kinda the same but not really: [...]

Google Earth setup experience

Google announced the release of Google Earth 4.3 today. Given the recent release of their WiX-based setup for the Google App Engine SDK, I had to give it a shot. (It helps that my day job also deals with 3-D terrain imagery.)
When you click the link to “Download Google Earth 4.3” (and accept the EULA), [...]

Two great tastes: Agile development and distributed, declarative setup

I’ve had the good fortune to work on several agile software-development teams over the years. If you’ve ever hated having software you’ve developed sit on the shelf for months or years until the next release, shipping several times a year feels good. Shipping almost every month is even better. Shipping almost every week is phenomenal.
Most [...]